I suggest that you visit Kerodin's blog and look around. They are very serious patriots who believe that conflict is imminent, and they don't seem to identify with the neonazi/white-supremist movement. The issue is liberty vs. tyranny not race conflict.

Hoping for the best is fine, but the III% is truly preparing for the worst.

The line between skeptical and paranoid is thin, eh? I've been tuned in to Kerodin's III% for a while now and that same thought crossed my mind at first. I think that they're just ahead of the curve, not content to wait until the fan gets encrusted before taking a stand. Peel back a few layers of the onion there and it looks like they have thought things out quite well so far.

Yeh, the rhetoric is becoming more heated, but consider how the Sons of Liberty must have seemed to most a decade before Lexington/Concord.

Addendum to previous post...By all means, check out Kerodin's saga before pigeonholing his efforts. The statist monster would have you dismiss the III% as some kind of radical fringe, but they are really a harbinger of the times to come.

I'm way too cranky to make something like that work, cd. No reasonable person would put up with me for a minute.

Still, 3000 remote acres does sound good, doesn't it?

Oh, 3,000 acres does indeed. The thing is, most of us, even on the lower end of the cranky scale, well, we don't "herd" very well. I'm not sure what the acre to person ratio would need to be for everyone to be able to exercise their "herd-less" natures, but I'd guess it would hover around 50:1 or something like that.

Oh, and the cranky is also an essential skill too. You've had to show the door to several folk here to keep this a pleasant place to visit. So you'd have a place in that ecosystem, I suspect.

Skepticism is more than justified for evaluating ANY proposal for the establishment of a community from scratch. That said, there is a long history of communities built around a charismatic figure. Consider Arcosanti or (on the dark side) Jonestown.

Skepticism is more than justified for evaluating ANY proposal for the establishment of a community from scratch. That said, there is a long history of communities built around a charismatic figure. Consider Arcosanti or (on the dark side) Jonestown.

There's also Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Theirs worked out a little better.

Do I treat Glocks like I treat my lawn mowers? No, I treat them worse. I treat my defensive weapons like my fire extinguishers and smoke detector - annual maintenance and I expect them to work when needed

While entire books could be and likely have been written on the topic, I'm gonna guess that the success of the Mormon community is related to their founders establishment (Mormons would say 'revelation') of a unique religion and their collective will to survive and succeed in the face of deadly persecution. In a very real sense, it's analogous to the Biblical story of Moses.

We've seen the notion of creating a 'tribe' again and again in the survivalist/prepper lore and the theme is repeated in numerous works of post-apocalyptic literature. The bottom line is that nobody can survive alone and either by design or circumstance communities will by necessity evolve from the chaos of the collapse. Most folks are followers and will gravitate toward those who have the skill and courage to lead.

My father-in-law (navy) explained it to me (very much a civilian) thus: once you've had a few torpedoes locked on you and incoming, and you listen to the countdown... and zero comes and goes and you're still sailing, it makes a lot of the stuff they worry about seem pretty small.

He also tells me time and time again about the time they were on day 62 of a 45 day food supply. He never turns his nose up at any kind of food.

My father-in-law (navy) explained it to me (very much a civilian) thus: once you've had a few torpedoes locked on you and incoming, and you listen to the countdown... and zero comes and goes and you're still sailing, it makes a lot of the stuff they worry about seem pretty small.

Or, as Winston Churchill put it (badly paraphrased) - there's nothing in the world that compares to the feeling of being shot at and missed.